Regator, the human-curated blog directory and news aggregator, just relaunched with a vastly improved and easier to use design, an improved search engine, and tight integration with Facebook Connect and Delicious. Regator’s mission is to aggregate the best content from blogs across over 500 categories. To do so, Regator’s editors created a vast directory of the best blogs on the Internet, with topics ranging from tech news and politics to tourism and beekeeping. The service’s algorithms then create front pages for every topic that includes the most popular and interesting articles from these blogs, as well as an index of related posts and lists of trending topics.
Focus on Mainstream, But With Some Nifty Advanced Features
While Regator’s core features are mainly aimed at mainstream users, advanced users and news junkies can use more advanced features like Regator’s trend graphs and blog monitor to stay updated about whatever topics interest them. The blog monitor, for example, allows you to keep up with news about your specific interests. Now, as part of the redesign, the blog monitor also features personalized RSS feeds for your topics, so that you can even use Regator to stay updated if you mostly use a feed reader.
To make use of these advanced features, you have to sign up for a free account or sign in to Regator with your Facebook account.
More New and Improved Features
Some of the major new updates to Regator also include grouped trends lists (currently, for example, Elena Kagan, Supreme Court and White House are grouped together), an improved search engine that also shows you which blogs typically cover the topic you are looking for, as well as integration with Facebook Connect. For new users, the site now also features a very easy to use sign-up wizard that gets you set up with a fully functioning Regator account in seconds.
As the Regator team told us at SXSW earlier this year, getting new users to sign up for the service and making the service more intuitive and easier to use were the driving factors behind this redesign. Judging from what we have seen so far, the team has definitely succeeded in this mission.
